The Guardian’s commentary encourages golf courses to relax dress codes and withdraw bans on social media and alcohol on the fairway to keep golf relevant. The Bloomberg report focuses on the failing golf courses embedded in housing developments, such as Ahwatukee Lakes Golf Course in Phoenix, describing them as “suburban zombies—not quite dead, yet far from alive.”
Golf clubs across the world have been warned that the sport could fall into crisis unless they lighten up a little, relax strict dress codes and withdraw bans on social media and booze on the fairway, The Guardian reported.
The game isn’t known for keeping pace with changes in wider society, but experts say it has to act now to embrace millennials. Consultants hired by the sport’s various governing bodies say golf clubs’ stuffy attitudes as well as the high cost of game have contributed to a roughly 10 million reduction in the number of players globally since before the financial crisis, The Guardian reported.
Steve Mona, chief executive of the World Golf Foundation, said clubs have to urgently adapt to the demands of younger people to ensure the sport has a future, as decisions by the world’s two biggest sports brands, Nike and Adidas, to pull out of golf equipment raised fears about the sport’s long-term future, The Guardian reported.
“The headlines ‘golf in crisis’ are overblown. We have a healthy number of core golfers,” Mona said. “But we do need to attract new and younger players. Each year about 500,000 leave the game because of death or the physical inability to play, and so every year we have to replace them.”
Mona said the WGF, which partners with golf national associations across the world, has been working hard to make golf more appealing to younger people and minorities, but real change must come from the clubhouse. He said clubs should ask themselves if their rules need to be as strict as they often are. “Can you go out on the golf course with your shirt untucked? Can you wear your cap backwards? Can you play music in your cart? Can you bring your mobile devices out there? Can you drink beer while you’re going round?
“Millennials are used to being able to do all those things in their recreation. We need to make it the same for golf.”
Mona concedes that traditionalists may prickle at the thought of selfies and beers on the green. “But clubs have to have something to please young people,” he said. “It’s a tricky problem. Someone like me wouldn’t think of engaging in social media on the course, I’d only be thinking of the next shot. But young people want to be on Facebook and Instagram between shots.”
He warned clubs that refuse to relax their rules and put all their chips in with baby boomers: “I’m telling you in eight to 10 years when they start aging out, you’re going to be in trouble,” he said. “What does it really matter if you’re in your regular foursome, and the group in front of you has golf boards and are playing music?”
The experts hope that golf’s inclusion in the Rio 2016 Olympics will spark a renewed interest in the game, but say the challenge is to convert that interest into participation, and note that the enthusiasm for the game generated by Tiger Woods tended to stay rooted to the sofa, The Guardian reported.
“Tiger Woods didn’t influence people to take up golf, it got more people to watch it on television, but they didn’t go out and play,” Tom Stine, co-founder of Golf Datatech, said. “He drew kids’ attention to the game because they wanted to be like Tiger, just like they do watching LeBron James or Lionel Messi.”
Both Stine and Mona believe the US game is only part way through a major reduction of the number of courses to reflect the number of regular players rather than real estate developers’ imaginations, The Guardian reported.
Mona, who plays off a handicap of nine, reckons there is going to be a continued contraction over the next three to five years with hundreds of courses closing a year. “At the high watermark in 2005 there were about 1,600 courses, today there are about 15,200, and I expect it to fall by another 1,000.
“There’s way too many of them,” he said. “In the boom years real estate entrepreneurs thought they’d build courses and people would flock to them. But when the market tanked, so did golf courses.”
A separate report in Bloomberg News details the tensions between the owners of struggling golf courses and the aggrieved neighbors in the surrounding communities.
In 2013, Wilson Gee, the owner of Phoenix’s Ahwatukee Lakes Golf Course, declared that the costs of keeping it open had outstripped what he was collecting in green fees. Gee shuttered the golf course, erected barbed-wire fences, and began looking for a buyer, telling reporters the land would never be a working golf course again, Bloomberg reported.
Homeowners, complaining he was turning the course into an eyesore in order to win approval to redevelop it into single-family homes, sued to reopen it. Gee shanked his first attempt to sell it in 2014, when one homebuilder walked away from a deal, but last year found a buyer in a Denver-based developer, Bloomberg reported.
Then one night in February, the dark clouds turned to smoke, and a fire caved in the clubhouse roof, Bloomberg reported.
More than 800 golf courses have closed nationwide in the last decade, and many of those shuttered courses were built on land proscribed from redevelopment by local zoning codes seeking to preserve open space—or, as with Ahwatukee, by deed restrictions intended to protect homeowners who had paid a premium to live near a golf course. That leaves some golf course owners with the real estate equivalent of an unplayable lie: They can’t make money running the course, and they can’t recoup their investment by selling it, Bloomberg reported.
“If you open a restaurant in a strip mall and you fail, you close shop and move on,” said Jay Karen, chief executive officer of the National Golf Course Owners Association. But for golf course owners, it’s much harder to pull the plug on a failing business; as courses fall into disuse, they become suburban zombies—not quite dead, yet far from alive, Bloomberg reported.
“Nobody’s tracking what’s happening to the land,” Karen said.
In April, fire ripped through the clubhouse at a shuttered western Kentucky golf course that had been the center of a lawsuit, burning through the afternoon until the roof collapsed over smoldering beams. On New Year’s Day, a former volunteer firefighter lit a small fire outside the vacant clubhouse of a closed nine-hole course outside Orlando, then returned three days later to spark a larger blaze, with the help of a can of paint thinner he had found there. And in September 2015, a fire reduced the 10,000-sq. ft. clubhouse at an abandoned golf course in Bakersfield, Calif., to only a few charred beams, Bloomberg reported.
For John Rhoads, a homeowner in Sparks, Nev., a clubhouse fire at his local course, D’Andrea Golf Club, was both insult and injury. In 2012, its owner had asked members of the local homeowner association to pay an additional $28 a month for course upkeep, Rhoads said. The homeowners demurred, the course was shuttered, and the clubhouse became a magnet for vandals, who posted graffiti on its stucco walls and eventually burned it down. Now Rhoads worries that the owner is making an end run around the homeowner association to convert half of the course into new homes and a winery, Bloomberg reported.
“This used to be one of the nicest golf courses in Reno-Sparks,” he said. “Our property values are already down $25,000 a home.”
In the face of declining interest and competition driven by oversupply, course owners have gone searching for ways out. Some have donated golf course land to nature trusts and local parks, taking a tax break in return for preserving the open space. Others have inked deals with homebuilders—though those deals are often contingent on winning approval from homeowner associations or local governments, Bloomberg reported.
Lately, the fight in Ahwatukee has reached a new pitch. In July, a Maricopa County judge declared that deed restrictions required the “operation of a golf course” on the property. Then a local television station reported last month, citing unnamed fire department sources, that the clubhouse fire was set intentionally, stoking resentment among neighbors of the course’s rundown state. Scott Walker, the department’s deputy chief of fire investigations, told Bloomberg the investigation is ongoing and no determination has been made.
This month, the developer to which Gee sold the course, True Life Companies, unveiled plans to redevelop it into an agricultural community with a community garden, a Montessori school, and as many as a few hundred homes, Bloomberg reported.
“They’re going to do whatever they can do to convince owners that they’d be better off with housing,” said Linda Swain, one of the homeowners suing to reopen the course. Getting the plan approved will require written approval from more than 2,600 residents, or 50 percent of the local homeowner association. Swain thinks that this will prove a tall order—but “after three years of disarray, maybe they have a chance.”
David Sabow, managing director at True Life Companies, said the lawsuit will be moot if the developer can win over the homeowners, but if need be, it’s prepared to litigate for years, Bloomberg reported.
“We spent a lot of time and effort to come up with a plan that the community would welcome,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, the property will never be a golf course again.”
Gee, for his part, is glad to have washed his hands of it. “People don’t like change,” he said. “But the golf industry is in even worse shape today than it was in 2013 when I closed the course.”
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